Chapter 6

Sensation and
Perception

PowerPoint®
presentation
by Jim Foley

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© 2013 Worth Publishers
 Sensation vs. Perception
Sensation Perception
“The process by which our “The process of organizing
sensory receptors and nervous and interpreting sensory
system receive and represent
stimulus energies from our information, enabling us
environment.” to recognize meaningful
objects and events.”

The brain The brain makes

receives input sense out of the
from the input from
sensory organs. sensory organs.

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Making sense of the world
Top-down
What am I processing:
seeing? using models,
ideas, and
expectations to
interpret sensory
information
Bottom-up
processing:
taking sensory
information and Is that
then assembling something I’ve
and integrating it seen before?
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 Do you see a
painting or a 3D
bottle?
What’s on the
bottle?

Kids see eight to ten

dolphins.

Why do you think kids see

something different than
adults?

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Top-down
Processing
You may start
to see
something in
this picture if
we give your
brain some
concepts to
apply:
“tree”
“sidewalk”
“dog”
“Dalmatian”
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From Sensory Organs to the Brain

The process of sensation can

be seen as three steps:

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Thresholds
The absolute threshold refers
to the minimum level of
stimulus intensity needed to
detect a stimulus half the time.

Anything below
this threshold
is considered
“subliminal.”

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Subliminal Detection

Subliminal:
below our threshold for
being able to consciously
detect a stimulus

 Although we cannot learn complex

knowledge from subliminal stimuli, we can
be primed, and this will affect our
subsequent choices.
 We may look longer at the side of the paper
which had just showed a nude image for an
instant.

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When Absolute
Thresholds are not
Absolute
Signal detection theory refers to whether or not we
detect a stimulus, especially amidst background noise.
This depends not just on intensity of the stimulus but on
psychological factors such as the person’s experience,
expectations, motivations, and alertness.

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Sensory Adaptation

 To detect novelty in our surroundings, our

senses tune out a constant stimulus.
 The rock in your shoe or the ticking of a clock
are more difficult to sense after a while.
 We don’t notice this visually because normally
our eyes are constantly moving.
 However, if you concentrate on keeping your
eyes in one spot, you’ll see the effects, as your
eyes adjust to stimuli in the following slides.

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Perceptual Set
Perceptual set is what we expect to see, which influences what we
do see. Perceptual set is an example of top-down processing .

Loch Ness monster Flying saucers

or a tree branch? or clouds?
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Perceptual set can be “primed.”

Ambiguous

Old woman Young

woman 13
 Context Effect on Perception
In which picture does the center dot look larger?
Perception of size depends on context.

Spelling test answers:

double pear apple payor payee pair
Did context affect which word you wrote? 14
Effect of Emotion, Physical State, and
Motivation on Perception
Experiments show that:
destinations seem farther
when you’re tired.
a target looks farther
when your crossbow is
heavier.
a hill looks steeper with a
heavy backpack, or after
sad music, or when walking
alone.
something you desire
looks closer.
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 Vision:
Energy, Sensation,
and Perception

The
Visible
Spectrum We encounter waves of electromagnetic
radiation.
Our eyes respond to some of these waves.
Our brain turns these energy wave
sensations into colors.

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 Color/Hue and
Brightness
We perceive the
wavelength/frequency of
the electromagnetic
waves as color, or hue.

We perceive the
height/amplitude of
these waves as
intensity, or
brightness.
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 The Eye

 Light from the candle passes through the cornea and the
pupil, and gets focused and inverted by the lens. The
light then lands on the retina, where it begins the
process of transduction into neural impulses to be sent
out through the optic nerve.
 The lens is not rigid; it can perform accommodation by
changing shape to focus on near or far objects. 18
Turning Neural Signals into Images
 Some ganglion cells in the eye send signals directly to
the visual cortex in response to certain features such
as visual patterns, certain edges, lines, or movements.
 In and around the visual cortex of the occipital lobe,
supercells integrate these feature signals to recognize
more complex forms such as faces.

Faces

Houses

Chairs
Houses and Chairs

SUPERCELLS
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Color Vision

Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic (Three-Color)

Theory
According to this theory, there are three types of
color receptor cones--red, green, and blue. All the
colors we perceive are created by light waves
stimulating combinations of these cones.

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 Color Blindness
People missing red cones or green
cones have trouble differentiating red
from green, and thus have trouble
reading the numbers to the right.

Opponent-process theory refers to

the neural process of perceiving white
as the opposite of perceiving black;
similarly, yellow vs. blue, and red vs.
green are opponent processes.

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 Opponent-Process Theory Test

The dot, the dot, keep staring at the dot in the center…
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Turning light waves into mental images/movies...
Perceptual Organization
We have perceptual processes for enabling us to
organize perceived colors and lines into objects:
grouping incomplete parts into gestalt wholes
seeing figures standing out against background
perceiving form, motion, and depth
keeping a sense of shape and color constancy despite
changes in visual information
using experience to guide visual interpretation

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Our senses take in the blue
information on the right.
The Role of
However, our perceptual
processes turn this into: Perception
1.a white paper with blue
circle dots, with a cube
floating in front.
2.a white paper with blue
circle holes, through which
you can see a cube.
3.a cube sticking out to the
top left, or bottom right.
4.blue dots (what cube?)
with angled lines inside.

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Figure-Ground Perception
 In most visual scenes, we pick out objects and figures,
standing out against a background.
 Some art muddles this ability by giving us two equal
choices about what is figure and what is “ground”:

Goblet or two Stepping man,

faces? or arrows? 25
Grouping: How We Make Gestalts
“Gestalt” refers to a meaningful pattern/configuration, forming a
“whole” that is more than the sum of its parts.
Three of the ways we group visual information into “wholes” are
proximity, continuity, and closure.

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Visual Cliff: A Test of Depth Perception
Babies seem to develop this ability at crawling age.

Even newborn animals fear the perceived cliff. 27

Perceiving Depth From a 2D Image:
Binocular Methods
Binocular (using both eyes) cues
exist because humans have two
eyes in the front of our head. This
gives us retinal disparity; the two
eyes have slightly different views,
and the more different the views
are, the closer the object must be.
In an extreme example, your nose
is so close that each eye sees a
completely opposite half-view of it.

How do we perceive depth

from a 2D image?...
by using monocular (needing
only one eye) cues
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 Monocular Cue: Interposition
Interposition:
When one object appears
to block the view of
another, we assume that
the blocking object is in a
position between our eyes
and the blocked object.

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 Monocular Cue:
Relative Size
We intuitively know to
interpret familiar objects (of
known size) as farther away
when they appear smaller.

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 Monocular Cues:
Linear Perspective and
Interposition

The flowers in the

distance seem
farther away
because the rows
converge. Our
brain reads this as
a sign of distance.

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Tricks Using
Linear
Perspective
 These two
red lines
meet the
retina as
being the
same size
 However,
our
perception of
distance
affects our
perception of
length.
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 Monocular Cues: Shading Effects

Shading helps our

perception of
depth.
Does the middle
circle bulge out or
curve inward?

How about now?

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 Monocular Cues: Relative Motion

When we are moving,

we can tell which
objects are farther
away because it takes
longer to pass them.

A picture of a moon on
a sign would zip behind
us, but the actual moon
is too far for us to pass.

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Perceptual Constancy
Our ability to see objects as appearing the same
even under different lighting conditions, at
different distances and angles, is called
perceptual constancy. Perceptual constancy is a
top-down process.

Examples:
color and brightness constancy
shape and size constancy

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 Color Constancy
 This ability to see a consistent
color in changing illumination
helps us see the three sides as all
being yellow, because our brain
compensates for shading.
 As a result, we interpret three
same-color blue dots, with shades
that are not adjusted for shading,
as being of three different colors.

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Brightness Constancy
On this screen, squares A and B are
exactly the same shade of gray.
You can see this when you connect
them.
So why does B look lighter?

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 Shape Constancy
Shape constancy refers to the ability to perceive objects as
having a constant shape despite receiving different sensory
images. This helps us see the door as a rectangle as it
opens. Because of this, we may think the red shapes on
screen are also rectangles.

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 The Moon Illusion
The moon appears
larger on the
horizon than
overhead.
 Why do we perceive the moon as
a different size depending on its
location?
 One possible theory is that our
ancestors assumed overhead
objects were closer than objects
on the horizon.
 The moon, like one of these
monsters, seems larger because
we see it as farther away.

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 Size Constancy
 We have an ability to use distance-related context
cues to help us see objects as the same size even if
the image on the retina becomes smaller.
 The Ames room was invented by American
ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames, Jr. in 1934.
 The Ames room was designed to manipulate
distance cues to make two same-sized girls appear
very different in size.

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Hearing/Audition: Starting with Sound

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Sound Waves Reach The Ear
The outer ear In the middle ear, the sound waves hit
collects sound the eardrum and move the hammer,
and funnels it anvil, and stirrup in ways that amplify
to the eardrum. the vibrations. The stirrup then sends
these vibrations to the oval window of
the cochlea.

In the inner ear,

waves of fluid
move from the
oval window over
the cochlea’s
“hair” receptor
cells. These cells
send signals
through the
auditory nerves to
the temporal lobe
of the brain.
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 Preventing
Hearing Loss
 Exposure to sounds
that are too loud to talk
over can cause damage
to the inner ear,
especially the hair cells.
 Structures of the
middle and inner ear
can also be damaged by
disease.
 Prevention methods
include limiting
exposure to noises over
85 decibels and treating
ear infections.

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 Sound Perception: Loudness
 Loudness refers to
more intense sound
vibrations. This causes
a greater number of
hair cells to send
signals to the brain.
 Soft sounds only
activate certain hair
cells; louder sounds
move those hair cells
AND their neighbors.

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 Sound Perception: Pitch
How does the inner ear turn sound
frequency into neural frequency?

Frequency theory
Place theory At low sound frequencies, hair
At high sound frequencies, cells send signals at whatever
signals are generated at rate the sound is received.
different locations in the
cochlea, depending on pitch.
The brain reads pitch by Volley Principle
reading the location where the At ultra high frequencies,
signals are coming from. receptor cells fire in succession,
combing signals to reach higher
firing rates. 45
 Taste
Our tongues have
receptors for five different
types of tastes, each of Bitter:
which may have had potential
survival functions. poisons

Sweet:
energy source
Umami:
(savoriness)
proteins to grow
and repair Salty: sodium
tissue essential to
physiological
Sour: processes
potentially toxic
acid

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Neurochemistry of Taste
 There are no regions of the tongue,
just different types of taste
receptor cells projecting hairs into
each taste bud’s pore.
 These cells are easily triggered to
send messages to the temporal
lobe of the brain.
 Burn your tongue? Receptors
reproduce every week or two. But
with age, taste buds become less
numerous and less sensitive.
 Top-down processes still can
override the neurochemistry;
expectations do influence taste.

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Mixing the different senses together
Sensory interaction occurs when

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different senses influence each other.
For example:
a burst of sound makes a dim light
source more visible.
flavor is an experience not only of taste,
but also of smell and texture.
Synaesthesia is a condition
seeing text or lip movement, or even
feeling the puff of air from consonants, when perception in one
affects what words we hear. sense is triggered by a
sensation in a DIFFERENT
sense.
Some people experience
synaesthesia all the time,
reporting that, “the number
7 gives me a salty taste” or
“rock music seems purple.” 48
Sensing Body Position and
Movement
 Kinesthesis (“movement
feeling”) refers to sensing
the movement and position
of individual body parts
relative to each other.
 How it works: sensors in the
joints and muscles send
signals that coordinate with
signals from the skin, eyes,
and ears
 Without kinesthesis, we
would need to watch our
limbs constantly to
coordinate movement.
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 Sensing Body Position and
Movement
 Vestibular sense refers to the ability to
sense the position of the head and
body relative to gravity, including the
sense of balance.
 How it works: fluid-filled chambers in
the inner ear (vestibular sacs and
semicircular canals) have hairlike
receptors that send messages about
the head’s position to the cerebellum
 Vestibular sense serves as the human
gyroscope, helping us to balance and
stay upright.

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